The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (45 page)

In the early seventies, a time when the overall magazine market was soft due to a national recession, Felker and his staff relied on a time-honored lure for newsstand sales: suddenly the cover was being graced by a procession of female models, even when the subject matter didn’t warrant it. A story on graffiti, for example, featured a comely woman being scrawled upon with spray paint. In February 1973 the magazine devoted an entire issue to couples and draped a red XXL bathrobe over a naked man and woman for the cover.

Jimmy Breslin wanted no part of
New York’s
move toward service and lifestyle features and the uptown elitism of which, in Breslin’s opinion, Clay Felker was so enamored. “Felker was never much of an editor in my view,” he said. “He was good at taking ideas from other people, but not much else.” There was a halfhearted attempt by Breslin at an editorial mutiny, in which the writer, with the help of publisher George Hirsch,
who felt Felker was too extravagant with his own expense account, tried to right the course back to investigative journalism by doing an end run around Felker and wresting control of the magazine through the board of directors. It backfired miserably when the board fired Hirsch in the winter of 1971, leaving Breslin in the lurch. Breslin resigned shortly thereafter.

“Breslin doesn’t like me, but there’s a good reason for it,” said Felker. “He wanted to change the direction of the magazine, and I didn’t do it. He really wanted
New York
to be more of a political magazine. He wanted to know why we were doing stories about life in Manhattan and ignoring what was happening in East Brooklyn. But I felt that advertisers were buying a responsive audience and I could provide it for them.”

Without Breslin’s moral conscience and Wolfe’s keen satirical eye,
New York’s
New Journalism was now being adulterated in the service of sensationalism. In the skillful hands of regulars such as Gail Sheehy or Julie Baumgold, New Journalism was a powerful tool, but it had to be wielded carefully. Given the freewheeling artistic license Felker permitted, the temptation to embellish the facts could be tempting. The first rule of New Journalism as laid down by Tom Wolfe, who published his anthology
The New Journalism
in 1973, was that whenever the style roamed freely, the facts had to be unassailable. Otherwise, the technique collapses, and its legitimacy along with it. When Hunter Thompson wrote that Ed Muskie was an Ibogaine addict, the claim was so outlandish that it entered the realm of metaphor—a Swiftian stab at character elucidation. When Sheehy conflated characters and senior editor Aaron Latham wrote about events he didn’t witness firsthand, however, it created a credibility crisis for the magazine and called into question the whole enterprise of New Journalism.

Sheehy’s most ambitious undertaking for
New York
to date was a sprawling, multipart examination of prostitution in New York—not only Times Square and Hell’s Kitchen, but the glittering precincts of wealth along the Upper East Side and the $500-a-night suites in the Waldorf-Astoria. For six months Sheehy melded into the seedy milieu of streetwalkers and their pimps, slowly gaining the confidence of the various sex workers she encountered, and walking the Lexington Avenue beat during the peak hours for business—6:00
P.M.
to 4:00
A.M.
Occasionally she would be accompanied by her brother-in-law, Bernie Sheehy, who posed
as a john or a peep show operator, thus providing an entry point for Sheehy to talk to her subjects. Over time, Sheehy gained the trust of a handful of prostitutes; she even had the great good fortune of being able to stash her tape recorder under a few fleabag hotel beds in order to record the seismic activity that transpired there. She interviewed cops and assistant DAs as well, and followed prostitution lawyers from criminal court to their favorite watering holes.

“Redpants and Sugarman,” the first of five installments in the series, took up the entire feature well of the July 26, 1971, issue, and it was more sexually graphic and existentially bleak than anything
New York
had attempted before. Even Walter Pincus, a stockholder in
New York’s
holding company Aeneid Equities, questioned the use of so much explicit detail, and wondered whether the magazine was compromising its standards by publishing borderline smut. The story focused on Red-pants, a black prostitute whom Sheehy encountered, and her initiation into the business of organized sex. Sheehy chronicles Redpants’s passage from aspiring fashion model to her infamy as a star among the stable of girls controlled by her pimp, Sugarman, a “voluptuous figure of a man, radiantly clothed,” who kept his charges in an apartment building in the Murray Hill district of Manhattan.

By utilizing her gift for mise-en-scène and shaping a gripping narrative from reams of source material, Sheehy elevated hustling from TV movie cliché. Less a cautionary tale than a look at how New York’s working girls mortgaged their futures by tapping into the thriving, quick-return economies of sex and petty theft, “Redpants and Sugarman” spared no detail. Sheehy was privy to everything, as in this scene at the Lindy Hotel, where Redpants is about to turn a trick with a john:

The national press picked up on the series;
Newsweek
called Sheehy “the hooker’s Boswell” and praised her vividly detailed reporting. Tom Wolfe wrote Sheehy an admiring letter, noting that the story “gives you such a rich emotional experience, from inside the skull, as it were, but also more to think about than all the bales of prostitution stories in the past.”

But for some close readers of the series, particularly the “Redpants and Sugarman” installment, Sheehy’s vivid details were a red flag indicating that something was amiss—there were too many undocumented statistics, anonymous sources, and interior monologues. Sheehy dissembled at first, claiming that “the original Redpants made an appointment to see me, but the other girls said they’d cut her up if she talked.” The editors had neglected to publish a disclaimer explaining that the character of Redpants in the story was in fact a composite of many different prostitutes Sheehy had encountered in her research.

“Nobody had the good sense to realize what the hell we were doing,” said former senior editor Shelly Zalaznick. “I knew the full meaning of the French word
chagrin
—I had a feeling of hopeless stupidity about the whole thing.” Zalaznick allowed that a simple disclosure would have obviated the need to defend Sheehy’s reporting after the fact, but he admits that the piece “was so seductive, you were swept into it and it suspended any disbelief of any kind. Everyone read it in manuscript, and it should have occurred to somebody to check it all out.” Former senior editor Jack Nessel, who edited the piece, has a more pragmatic explanation for the lapse: “There was really no such thing as composite characters in
New York
in those days, Adam Smith notwithstanding, which is why no one thought of it.”

Jack Nessel thinks Sheehy’s eagerness to please Felker played a significant role. “I think Clay was in love with Gail from the start of their professional relationship, and she was extremely willing to be molded by him,” he said. “Clay wasn’t a writer—he needed people to be his writing
implements, to set down his ideas on paper—and Gail fit the bill. They played into each other’s needs. If ambition could be incarnated, it would look like Gail. I’ve never seen any man or woman as ambitious as her.” (Felker and Sheehy were married in 1984.)

For traditional journalists who disparaged New Journalism and regarded its biggest stars with skepticism and a twinge of jealousy, Sheehy’s gaffe was the beginning of the end of New Journalism. “New Journalism is rising,” the
Wall Street Journal
wrote, “but its believability is declining.” It was hard to dispute that, in the absence of a published disclosure or some explanation of Sheehy’s methods, “Redpants and Sugar-man” was New Journalism run amok.

Sheehy wasn’t the only
New York
writer whose methods were called into question during the post-Breslin era. Two profiles by Aaron Latham were criticized by their subjects for massaging facts and not using proper editorial discretion. Latham, a former
Esquire
editor, had been assigned to write a profile of Gay Talese. Harold Hayes’s favorite writer had already written two best-sellers—
The Kingdom and the Power
, a history of the
New York Times
, and
Honor Thy Father
, the first insider account of the inner workings of the Mafia, which had sold over 2.2 million copies in paperback. Talese’s reputation as the most meticulous and aggressively immersive journalist in America had only been burnished by the two books, and now he was researching his most ambitious project; a history of American sexual mores, for which he had been paid $1.9 million by Doubleday as part of a two-book deal.

A key component of Talese’s research involved working as the night manager in two different massage parlors in Manhattan, the Middle Earth and the Fifth Season; Latham, in true New Journalism fashion, decided to accompany Talese on his rounds in the summer of 1973. The piece, “An Evening in the Nude with Gay Talese,” shocked readers who regarded Talese as a prim and proper gent, a writer who was rarely photographed without a suit and tie. Here was Talese in various stages of undress, engaging in erotically charged situations with sex workers:

Talese felt that Latham’s article, while factually accurate, lacked the dignity and compassion that he brought to the subject of professional sex, but Latham was merely abiding by
New York’s
new code of sensationalism, in which New Journalism was callously exploited. It was what Hunter Thompson had carped about in
Hell’s Angels
, the “supercharged hokum” of the mainstream press resorting to certain “disparities in emphasis and context” in order to pump up the noise of a story.

Latham’s profile of Sally Quinn, which ran a week after the Talese story, provoked even more outrage from its subject. Quinn, at the time a rising thirty-two-year-old star for the
Washington Post’s
Style section, had recently been hired to host CBS’s morning show in order to create a credible competitor for NBC’s ratings powerhouse
Today
, which was hosted by Barbara Walters. The article, which was the cover story for the July 16, 1973, issue, made a big deal of Quinn’s sex appeal and implied that the
Washington Post
writer was perhaps exploiting her female attributes to advance her career. Which wasn’t necessarily actionable on Quinn’s part: Latham, after all, was entitled to speculate about her motives.

But one passage, in which Quinn allegedly conducted a “Gallup Poll” of penis sizes in Washington, was overheard by Clay Felker at a dinner party hosted by Walter Pincus and his wife, Arin. However, it had supposedly been Washington hostess Barbara Hower, not Quinn, who had sized up the sexual assets of one particular man, not “all the men in Washington.” Quinn was a guest at the party, but she claimed that the quotes about sex that Latham attributed to her weren’t accurate. “I’ve never read anything like this, even about a movie star,” an irate Quinn told the
New York Times
. “And this is not supposedly
Screen
magazine. That’s what shocks me.”

This was all good business for the magazine, which managed to sustain its readership and healthy ad revenue even in the midst of New York City’s fiscal crisis in 1975. That made it an attractive property for a young
Australian newspaper magnate who had set his sights on establishing a significant media beachhead in the most important city in the world.

At the age of forty-five, Rupert Murdoch had built a $100 million empire that stretched from San Antonio to Sydney, largely on the strength of lurid headlines and pinup cheesecake in his tabloid publications. He owned eleven magazines and eighty-four newspapers, the majority of them tabloids, including the
New York Post
, a paper that he had acquired by sweet-talking its seventy-three-year-old owner, Dorothy Schiff into selling it to him for $32.5 million in November 1976.

The
New York Post
acquisition would turn out to be one of Murdoch’s shrewdest moves, and he owed it all to Felker, who had introduced Murdoch to Schiff. As is often the case with ambitious social climbers, the two moved in the same social circles, and inevitably found themselves at the same dinner parties, their embossed placecards conveniently aligned on the same side of the table. Felker and Murdoch had first met in 1973 and had struck up a casual relationship in which the finer points of the publishing business were often discussed and argued. Felker envied Murdoch’s uncanny business acumen, his genius for buying properties at fire-sale prices and growing his empire. Murdoch, for his part, longed for some of the cultural cachet that Felker had accrued with
New York
. But as anyone in the publishing business understood, it was awfully hard to reconcile both impulses into one enterprise, and both men’s opposing tendencies would soon converge in ways that neither could have anticipated.